The story takes place in Vancouver, in the near future. Herb Charity is a cyber policeman, part of a specialised branch of the police force that hunts down pedophiles on the Net. During one of their inquests, he arrests a young woman and falls in love with her. Yet Unica Bathory is a disconcerting character: a women who appears to have stopped growing up - a fake child with white hair. She is also the leader of a gang of nanoterrorists that punishes voyeurs as well as the clients of pedophilic networks by injecting their cortex with a computer chip to make them feel the pain of the children they abuse – an unbearable suffering that can provoke blindness.
At the frontier between reality and the virtual, truth and deceit, a strange love story develops between Herb, a young man not yet fully adult, and Unica, a grown up woman locked in the body of a young girl. Unica is a cruel and playful tale that takes place in a very near future and offers a highly topical reflection on the era of virtuality (love through machines, virtual crimes…).
Élise Fontenaille is a formidable story teller. Hers are wonder worlds populated with the strangest of characters. With Unica, she constructs a story in the tradition of Philip-K. Dick and Tim Burton’s fiction.
Born in Nancy in 1960, Élise Fontenaille began her career as a journalist. She has written five novels, published by Grasset: La Gommeuse (1997), Le Palais de la Femme (1999), Demain les Filles on va tuer papa (2001), L’Enfant Rouge (2002) et Brûlements (2006).
L'auteur
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